Social Media Engagement

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As we all know that social media is no more just a fun for businesses. They are seriously getting engaged in social media by doing various things like Facebook fan pages, Twitter, forums, blogs, etc. Social Commerce and Social CRM are important new intiatives in businesses. The customers are also acrtively getting engaged in such interactions. So it is very important to understand why interactions are happening so that the interactions can be properly handled. There are various purposes that customers interact with business on social media.

IBM Institutte for Business Value Analysis recently published a summary paper of survey of CRM on Social media. One of the important finding in the paper was about a perception gap between how the companies, who create fan pages or engage in social media intitives, think about what could be customers value to different aspects of the interaction vs how the customer really think about them.

Here is what they found:

You can notice a gap between how consumers rank vs business rank. Discounts (Deals, offers), purchases, getting product information, reviews, ranking etc top the consumers list. While learning new products, getting information, feeling connected, customer service, to be part of community were ranked higher by the businesses. The businesses gave more than needed importance to feeling connected, being a part of community. At the same time, they missed that consumers give more importances to purchases and discounts. So there are good opportunities for SocialCommerce!

People: It is important to understand the customers or target audience behaviour. What are they? how do they engage on social media etc. Based on the customer understanding, appropriate technology as well as media can be identified.

Objective: It is very important to understand what is the goal of social media engagement. Is it for creating awareness via marketing or creating more sales lead or addressing issues of customers or create awareness about the usage of products / services? There are various objectives: They can be : 1. Listening to customers 2. Talking to the customers 3. energizing customers to spread word of mouth or further awareness 4. Customer support 5. Embracing to customer feedbacks or ideas. If you want to map these tasks to the traditional tasks enterprises do then:

Strategy: What is the expected change by doing the engagement? what is the effective strategy to have it? It is very important to think about how to engage customers and hw will that engagement grow and influence internally as well as externally. Since the planning of social media engagement can take endless time and most importantly while you doit, the market dynamics would force it to change it. Hence it is important to start small but have plan to grow further. Important aspect is to have an idea of how it would impact, what is the endgame, how it would change company. Social media engagement is sometimes like a stirring a beehive. One should be ready with proper strategy to engage the customers otherwise it may backfire. There is no right way to engage social media customers. However, there is a genuine and respectful attempt with some creativity and innovation would definitely help.

technology: Wiki/ blogs/ social networks/ sentiment analysis/ twitter/ forums / what tools should be used? If you are engaged in online community development then proper technology like communispace, or MarketTools/Network insights can be looked into. Considering the volume that one may need to deal with the proper aggregation, filtering, sentiment analysis and summarizing technologies are needed to bring down the endless chatter into some manageable flow of information. For example, MotiveQuest, Nelson’s BuzzMetrics, Cymfony.

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Forrester research developed a concept of technographics profiles of people using Social media technologies. This concept for categorization of Social Media users was eloborated by Charlen Li and JOsh in their book, Groundswell, as well. Forrester research has developed a tool for capturing such profiles of consumers of a business. Here is a nice presentation on this technograohics ladder presented by Josh Bernoff and Jacqueline Anderson.

The first suggestion of Converse CMO was when he encountered 8million fans on Facebook he decided to be a passive listener by “doing nothing”. Its difficult for any marketer to “let it go”. To implement this advise, one has to accept the paradigm shift required in customer enagagement on Social media. He outlined his philosophy: “Our philosophy in social media has been to bring our voice to the medium, which includes acting like a good party guest — we bring something to the table, and we listen more than we talk.” This is the same advise stressed by Groundswell authors, Charlen Li and Josh Bernoff. It is important to be listener on social media sites that trying to intercept and shape conversations.

One has to understand the pscycology of consusmers. The fans of any brand want to know about product and like offers but it is important to have an emotional connection . George mentioned that his team is trying to be a good host for that connection for their brand. He emphasised the “two way communication aspect of the social media”

He emphasised trust, genuine tone, and respect are important aspect in social media engagement with the consumers.

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Charlen Li and Josh Bernoff, two leading analysts from Forrester, have written a wonderful book “GroundSwell” which opened up doors to master Social technologies to influence customers and learn from customers in the social media. This book covers from what is Groundswell, how to trigger and ride on the groundswell with a lot of practical tips and steps using case studies.

The authours defined Groundswell as : A social trend inwhich people use technologies to get the things they need from each other , rather than from traditional institutions like corporations. The rational behind the groundswell timing is:

1. People: People depend on each other. They share as well as influence each other

2. technology: Technology and its usage has eanbled people to connect and share with each other.

One should care about groundswell because it is a game changer for many professionals. For brand manager, its a threat because brand is no-longer depends on what and how you project but it is depends on how consumers interact and impress on each other. For a news media, its changing how the news are evolved and distributed. The groundswell has changed the balance of power.

At the end of this book, the authors summarized the lessos that would help businesses to make social media transition:

1. Never forget that the groundsell is about person-to-person activity. This requires a level of emphathy with people(customers). Blogging, connecting in communities, friending – these are all personal activities and engagement needs to be at the personal level with personal tone.

2. Be good listener: This is an important tips to marketers who often think that they know all and their job is to talking to customers to educate them or impress on them. However, in social media engagement, “the best listeners will end up the smartest”.

3. Be patient: Social media initiatives and apps touch too many parts of enterprise businesses and transitioning in terms of people, process and tools takes time and patience.

4. Be opportunistic: Start with baby steps but have a grand vision in mind and surge with speed when there is a green light.

5. Be flexible: Groundswell is full of surprises. Events happen without your control. This requires groundswell thinking to constantly adjust and learn from the events.

6. Be collaborative: Work collaboratively with those with similar ideas in your company.

7. Be humble: In the social media world, the world power comes only to those who are humble.

These are vary fundamental principles, nothing to do with technologies or apps, but are basic practical tips for mastering social media for businesses.

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The US State Department’s Bureau of International information Program is focussing on Social Media Network. According to its PR on 28 Jan 2011 published on its website http://www.state.gov/r/iip/ the bureau recognizes that

The explosion of social media;

English no longer dominates the Web – more than fifty percent of web users speak a native language other than English, and site “stickiness” doubles when a web offering is in the language of the user.

Some interesting comments from its coordinator Dawn Macall:

She outlined following social Media engagement strategy:

1. Social media Focus: IIP will transition America.Gov to directly distribute content to the full range of social networks and existing 3rd party sites where audiences actually spend their time

2. Social media Engagement: Creation of a talent management unit to identify and recruit expert Americans as writers, bloggers, and speakers for IIP and American missions;

3. Social media Analytics of Audience: A new audience research unit, to provide research and analysis on audiences, channels, and use of IIP products.

The America.gov site also revamped to enable “two-way conversation between America and people in other countries,”.

so, when even the State Department understands the importance of social media engagement , how can businesses lag behind? Of course, they would surge into the Social Media engagement for their benefits both interms of out-bound messaging as well as actively listening feedbacks and ideas.

However, he raised few valid points. The visibility of Facebook comments is wider that it should be. It is based on Social graph. Your comments get displayed in your social circle as well as in the social circle of the friend / page on which you commented. I agree with Jordan that in real life you do not want your comments to be visible to every one but only to the people who are interested or who matters. In that respect, it is important to have a visibility control to the person who gives the comments. It can be based on interests , conversation thread, groups, etc.
There is another issue of about using Facebook comments in your application is who owns the data (comments). Jordon rightly asserted that Facebook wants your data. Yes, for good or bad, every one in web2.0 wants data. Today the User Generated Data(UGC) is the king. It becomes the basis of crowd intelligence, it provides insight about users preferences/tastes, it gives insight about public opinions about event/news/product/topic/subject that can be used for various purposes. These comments are the basis for Social Analytics, Social Media Monitorng as well as social medi engagement. So, not just Facebook but most of the comments sites would/should treat this data as asset. However, if any app / blog / site is using these comments sites, the app / bog / site own should get access to the complete data.